It’s Happened To Stirling Moss, It Could Happen To You

Sir Stirling Moss recently lost several hundered pounds to a cyber attacker who hacked into his bank account.

This attack helps illustrate how vulnerable your personal information is and why it’s so critical to take steps at all times to protect it – particularly as according to the National Fraud Authority, identity theft now costs nearly £2bn and affects over 1.8 million people.

It was reported on the BBC only yesterday that a Lancashire fraud detective had himself suffered identity theft. Worryingly he didn’t seem to notice a standing order running for a credit card for 12 months.

He said “I managed to recover the money from the credit card company but it took an awful lot of letter writing and telephoning.”

A positive ending but whilst I appreciate I don’t have the full story surley a lot of stress could have been avoided if more attention and care had been taken protecting his personal finance in the first place – and regularly checking the entries on his credit card statement at the very least.

Every time you enter your personal information online you could be unwittingly giving this information to fraudsters. You need to take simple precautions to protect your information.

For example, if you use your computer to make an online payment, make sure you are using a secure server.

You can tell if this is the case as if so there will be a small padlock icon in the bottom right hand coner as you are making the payment. Also the website page address should being with ‘https’.

If either of these are missing then you are not protected and you should consider buying from elsewehere.

Also protect your computer with a suitable firewall and make sure you have up to date anti-virus and anti-spyware software on it.

Taking that extra care really can help you avoid becoming one of the statistics and a victim of identity theft.

About The Author

Diane

With the background of a long standing career at senior level within the insurance industry, I've been writing articles on personal finance matters for MoneyHighStreet since we started it in 2006.
As a family of 4, plus a wonderful labrador, our main goal is really to enjoy life, to have fun!
To achieve our goal, like it or not, we need to really get the most from our money. I enjoy sharing how we tackle this.